Based on kernel version 3.19. Page generated on 2015-02-13 21:20 EST.
1 Execute-in-place for file mappings 2 ---------------------------------- 3 4 Motivation 5 ---------- 6 File mappings are performed by mapping page cache pages to userspace. In 7 addition, read&write type file operations also transfer data from/to the page 8 cache. 9 10 For memory backed storage devices that use the block device interface, the page 11 cache pages are in fact copies of the original storage. Various approaches 12 exist to work around the need for an extra copy. The ramdisk driver for example 13 does read the data into the page cache, keeps a reference, and discards the 14 original data behind later on. 15 16 Execute-in-place solves this issue the other way around: instead of keeping 17 data in the page cache, the need to have a page cache copy is eliminated 18 completely. With execute-in-place, read&write type operations are performed 19 directly from/to the memory backed storage device. For file mappings, the 20 storage device itself is mapped directly into userspace. 21 22 This implementation was initially written for shared memory segments between 23 different virtual machines on s390 hardware to allow multiple machines to 24 share the same binaries and libraries. 25 26 Implementation 27 -------------- 28 Execute-in-place is implemented in three steps: block device operation, 29 address space operation, and file operations. 30 31 A block device operation named direct_access is used to retrieve a 32 reference (pointer) to a block on-disk. The reference is supposed to be 33 cpu-addressable, physical address and remain valid until the release operation 34 is performed. A struct block_device reference is used to address the device, 35 and a sector_t argument is used to identify the individual block. As an 36 alternative, memory technology devices can be used for this. 37 38 The block device operation is optional, these block devices support it as of 39 today: 40 - dcssblk: s390 dcss block device driver 41 42 An address space operation named get_xip_mem is used to retrieve references 43 to a page frame number and a kernel address. To obtain these values a reference 44 to an address_space is provided. This function assigns values to the kmem and 45 pfn parameters. The third argument indicates whether the function should allocate 46 blocks if needed. 47 48 This address space operation is mutually exclusive with readpage&writepage that 49 do page cache read/write operations. 50 The following filesystems support it as of today: 51 - ext2: the second extended filesystem, see Documentation/filesystems/ext2.txt 52 53 A set of file operations that do utilize get_xip_page can be found in 54 mm/filemap_xip.c . The following file operation implementations are provided: 55 - aio_read/aio_write 56 - readv/writev 57 - sendfile 58 59 The generic file operations do_sync_read/do_sync_write can be used to implement 60 classic synchronous IO calls. 61 62 Shortcomings 63 ------------ 64 This implementation is limited to storage devices that are cpu addressable at 65 all times (no highmem or such). It works well on rom/ram, but enhancements are 66 needed to make it work with flash in read+write mode. 67 Putting the Linux kernel and/or its modules on a xip filesystem does not mean 68 they are not copied.